The Buzz This Week about Rising Sea Levels

By Bill Sweet

Posted 30 Nov 2012 | 11:20 GMT

Those attentive to science news developments—and many members of the general public—will have heard mention this week of rising sea levels. The main reason was publication yesterday by Science magazine of two major research articles, along with a news summary and commentary. The one getting most of the attention comes from a team led by Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University in the UK and is called "A Reconciled Estimate of Ice-Sheet Mass Balance." A second article, by Ian Joughin and colleagues delves into the dynamics of how the great Greenland and Antarctic sheets melt and disintegrate as warm waters intrude.

The importance of the Shepherd article is that it confirms the general estimates of ice sheet destruction made in a 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), while greatly narrowing the range and increasing the certainty of the IPCC's estimates, as a Science magazine press release explains. "Altogether, Greenland and Antarctica are now losing more than three times as much ice (equivalent to 0.95 mm of sea level rise per year) as they were in the 1990s (equivalent to 0.27 mm of sea level rise per year)." Shepherd's group concludes that ice sheet melting has accounted for about one-fifth of the world's sea level rise since 1992.